dreaming@echonyc.com: "with enough ketchup, you can eat anything."

last night i caught up again with my best friend from college, matt lerner. he's the only person from miami that i'm still in touch with, in fact, and he's by far the most worthwhile person i knew then. (if you get one true friend out of every four years of life, i'd say you're doing pretty well indeed.)

matt's living in san francisco now after a two-year trip around the world. visit his travelogue if you need a quick escape to nepal, botswana, yemen, and beyond. travel broadened him, not that he was ever that narrow. speaking of chickens, a brief excerpt:

That night, we camped in Lilongwe, Malawi's capital. A chicken made himself at home on top of our tent (pictured below). In the morning, the chicken was gone, but he left us a present. It was not an egg.

i credit matt almost entirely for our move to vermont (not to mention my diploma, as he was the only one of my friends who actively encouraged studying). we were sitting in golden unicorn in manhattan's chinatown in 2000 when he was in town for a business trip. over dim sum, he told me he was planning this trip. "why?" i asked him. "you're doing so well at [insert recognizable name of dot-com boom company here]."

what he said made an enormous impact on me: "why would i want to wait for things to turn to shit before i fulfill a dream? why not leave on a high note?"

that's what he did, and that's what we did. why wait, indeed?

dreaming@echonyc.com

i think i just swallowed a pin.

"with enough ketchup, you can eat anything."

Comments